This brief survey of Gothic church architecture in Europe focuses on medieval Gothic church architecture excluding, thus, neo-Gothic buildings. In comparison to other, older books of this kind, the present work presents the Gothic Architecture by including also the marginal zones and extreme fringes of Europe, presenting architecture from Scandinavia to Romania, including even Gothic architectural elements in Russia or Greece. This book is based on scholarship and important books on the history of arts, but tries to avoid the specialist’s view and does not use jargon (or only as much as was absolutely necessary). One can easily imagine a group of tourists who, on having joined an all-inclusive package conducted coach tour of cathedrals in Germany, Austria or Poland, on entering a third or fourth hall church, may have a feeling of déjà vu, without being able to remember exactly where they have seen something very similar. Where, besides Canterbury, have they seen in England a choir screen separating the nave from the choir? Or double transepts? Where in France or Spain, apart from Notre-Dame in Paris or Toledo, have they seen double aisles flanking each side of the nave? Everybody knows, even from personal experience, that if you’re rubber-necking, doing, say, several castles on the Rhine River Valley or in Château Country in France, or the monasteries of Northern Moldavia, in just one day, you end up by getting superimposed images, leading to serious headache. This book should be taken as a guide-book in the best sense of the word: The author feels pretty confident that after reading this book and looking at the relevant illustrations, the perceptive reader will be able to identify certain morphological details and thus distinguish between the various types of circular windows (rose windows, wheel windows, oculi) or types of gables (e.g. the triangular gables of Italy, the stepped gables of Germany and Poland, the Dutch gables of the Low Countries, the bell-gables of village churches in Spain, Mexico, and the Latin American Countries)weiterlesen